Fueled by an expanding class of billionaires, political spending on the 2022 midterm elections will shatter records at the state and federal levels, with much of it from largely unregulated super PACs financed with enormous checks written mainly by Republican megadonors.
“We’ve broken records with our broken records,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Open Secrets, which estimated on Thursday that total spending in 2021 and 2022 would reach $16.7 billion when tallied after Election Day, easily surpassing the previous midterm record of $14 billion set in 2018.
The total spent on federal races, currently $7.5 billion, has already passed the inflation-adjusted record of $7.1 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $8.9 billion when all is tallied. Of that, 15.4 percent has come from billionaires, up from 11.9 percent in 2020 and 15.3 percent in 2018. Beyond billionaires, the top 1 percent of donors, measured by income, has given 38 percent of the total.
The American campaign finance system increasingly mirrors American society, with hundreds of thousands of small donors trying to keep pace with a billionaire class whose spending appears nimble and bottomless. Democrats have largely kept up on the airwaves by constantly hectoring rank-and-file supporters to pitch in.
But billionaires from high finance, Silicon Valley, media and old-line manufacturing have given party-aligned ideological groups — mainly conservative ones — an easy way to surge forward. And as inflation pinches small donors, megadonors are becoming all the more important.
“This is a crucial sector of the contribution base because they are able to nimbly put in whatever amounts are needed at any moment,” Ms. Krumholz said Thursday. “It’s a highly volatile source, and it could change rapidly, even in the next few days.”
While both parties have their billionaires, Republicans have many more. Of the 25 top donors this cycle, 18 are Republican, according to Open Secrets, and they have outspent Democrats by $200 million. Billionaires make up 20 percent of total Republican donations compared with 14.5 percent of Democratic donations.
Even that may understate the disparity.